The wrong guy hosted the hearings.

Instead of Henry Waxman, it should have been Bud Collyer or Garry Moore, Robin Ward or Alex Trebek acting as M.C. of the latest incarnation of that long-running, popular television program To Tell the Truth.

Or maybe Joe Garagiola. He's a baseball guy, who also was host of To Tell the Truth for a season in the late '70s.

There was a marathon edition of that old show aired Wednesday, with Congressmen Waxman, Democrat of California, hosting a four-hours-plus revival dedicated to determining who was the bigger liar -- Brian McNamee or Roger Clemens.

Unlike Clemens, I've got to confess -- I didn't make it all the way to the end of the dog-and-pony show.

Four agonizing, rather than interesting, hours -- from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. -- was as much as I could take, as much as I could watch, as much as I could listen to, as much as I could stomach of those sleazy characters.

That's a category in which I include not just Clemens and McNamee, but also a goodly number of the congressmen and congresswomen present, all eager for their five minutes of face time on national television.

No wonder the country's in such a mess, if Wednesday's partisan squabble conducted in front of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform is an indication of the way our government conducts business.

The one absolutely, incontrovertibly true statement that came out of the hearing was made by Waxman, in his opening remarks, when he observed that somebody was lying.

If you were a Republican, you thought it was McNamee. If you were a Democrat, you thought it was Clemens. For a while, I actually wondered if the two parties had been assigned sides, like in a high school debate, where one side argues "pro" and the other "con."

Perhaps Barack Obama's newest campaign slogan ought to be "Bush is bad enough; Republicans like Roger, too!"

Speaking of "con" - that could some day describe either McNamee or Clemens, because one of them perjured himself under oath.

And it appears to have been Clemens.

While McNamee acknowledged that he had not always been entirely truthful prior to the hearing, he could have said that he had never lied under oath.

As for Roger, well, let's consider a few of his comments -- bearing in mind, of course, that, like Andy Pettitte, I may have "misremembered" what I heard.

During his days with the Red Sox, Clemens not infrequently claimed he was "misinterpretated" by the media, which led to The Boston Herald quoting the Rocket's postgame comments literally word for word.

It wasn't pretty. Nor especially articulate. Much like much of Roger's testimony.

The Rocket insisted he never has taken either steroids or human growth hormone. McNamee testified that he injected Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch and Clemens. Pettitte, considered a close friend of Clemens', and Knoblauch both acknowledged that McNamee had, at their request, given them HGH. Pettitte, in a sworn affidavit, said he'd had conversations with Clemens in which Roger said he'd used HGH.

Clemens said Pettitte must have "misheard" or "misremembered."

There was much palaver over whether Clemens had attended a party at the home of Jose Canseco, who has written, and often spoken, about his own steroid use. Roger said he wasn't there. Yet the woman who was working as nanny for the Clemens children at the time told investigators she not only remembered Clemens being at the party, but also that Roger's wife, Debbie, and the children spent the night at the Canseco home.

Clemens and his lawyers -- who were very much in evidence at the hearing, sitting just behind their client and jumping up several times when they objected to the line of questioning, as well as frequently whispering in his ear -- had interviewed the nanny, inviting her to the Clemens home to talk with Roger before giving her name to investigators. That raised the question of witness tampering.

Speaking of Debbie Clemens, she acknowledged receiving an injection of HGH from McNamee one time, in the bedroom of her Texas home, when Roger was not present.

Yet, even though his wife, along with his close friend, Pettitte, got shots from McNamee, Clemens was indignant regarding McNamee's assertions that the Rocket, too, had been given shots.

Roger also said he'd have talked to former Sen. George Mitchell, whose report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in major league baseball is what led to Wednesday's hearing, in "a New York minute" if only, ahem, he'd been told by his agents, the Hendricks brothers, that the senator wanted to see him.

There was talk of a phone call from Clemens to McNamee, one in which Clemens, who was taping the call, never directly asked McNamee why he lied -- perhaps because he didn't want to hear McNamee say he was telling the truth.

The way the show was going, one couldn't help but wonder if Clemens made that call on his shoe phone, like secret agent Maxwell Smart.

There was a laugh-out-loud moment when Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, pointed to pictures of Clemens wearing the uniforms of the Red Sox, the Blue Jays, the Yankees and the Astros, and proclaiming he looked much the same in all of them.

That would be like looking at photo of Hilary Clinton and saying she should have been a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, like Debbie Clemens.

Anyone who's seen photos of Roger as a sinewy, raw-boned flamethrower during his early days in Boston, and compares them with the thick-necked, solidly built power pitcher who continued to dominate batters late in his career cannot help but notice a difference as dramatic as Clemens' testimony, compared to McNamee.

Now, I wish I'd stayed tuned to the end of the program, if only to find out if it was a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman production.